Uncover Cost Savings with GKE’s Golden Signals

Introduction:

As businesses increasingly move towards cloud infrastructure, optimizing costs has become a top priority. According to Flexera’s State of the Cloud Report 2024, 89% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy, with cost reduction being the main driver for 76% of them. This makes it essential for businesses to have a deep understanding of their cloud usage and identify potential cost-saving opportunities.

Source: Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report

In this article, we will explore how Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) can help businesses uncover cost savings through its Golden Signals feature.

GKE’s Golden Signals provides real-time metrics and insights into a cluster’s resource usage, performance, errors, and traffic. It allows businesses to monitor their GKE clusters in a single dashboard and identify potential cost-saving opportunities.

Source: Google Cloud Docs

The Golden Signals feature breaks down cluster costs into four categories:

• CPU utilization: This metric measures the amount of CPU resources used by a cluster. By monitoring this, businesses can identify overprovisioned resources and downsize them, saving on costs.
• Memory utilization: Similar to CPU utilization, this metric measures the amount of memory used by a cluster. By monitoring this, businesses can identify underutilized resources and optimize them, reducing costs.
• Persistent disk utilization: This metric measures the disk space used by a cluster. Businesses can use this to identify unused or oversized disks and resize them to save on costs.
• Network utilization: This metric measures the amount of network traffic used by a cluster. By monitoring this, businesses can identify traffic patterns and optimize their network resources to reduce costs.

GKE’s Golden Signals also offers a snapshot of the current cluster state, making it easier for businesses to identify any potential issues that may be affecting performance or causing unnecessary costs

Actionable Takeaways:

Here are some key takeaways from GKE’s Golden Signals that businesses can use to optimize their cloud costs:

• Regularly monitor CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization to identify any potential cost-saving opportunities.
• Use Golden Signals to identify any performance issues that may be impacting the cluster’s efficiency and costs.
• Leverage real-time insights to make data-driven decisions and optimize resource allocation.

Conclusion:

With GKE’s Golden Signals, businesses can have a better understanding of their cluster usage and identify potential cost-saving opportunities. By regularly monitoring and optimizing resource usage, businesses can achieve significant cost savings while maintaining high performance levels.

Generali, in collaboration with Google Cloud Consulting, achieved double-digit percent savings on its GKE investment. Moving forward, Generali plans to finalize rightsizing and bin packing for all clusters, complete its evaluation of GKE Autopilot, and prepare new commitments post-optimization.

To learn more about GKE’s Golden Signals and how it can help businesses optimize their cloud costs, check out Google’s blog post on the topic.

References:

1. Flexera State of the Cloud Report 2020 (https://www.flexera.com/enterprise/resources/reports/state-of-the-cloud-report.html)
2. Google Blog – GKE’s Golden Signals Help Identify Potential Cost Savings (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/cost-management/gkes-golden-signals-help-identify-potential-cost-savings/)

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